Racial classification confused itself when welfare need rested on individual choice

Evidence

But there were also remarks and notations that had no fixed association with one social group. Adjectives slipped from poor white to mixed blood and confused the commission’s efforts to distinguish among them. Much of the confusion rested on the issue of “choice”: how to account for a young woman who had converted to Islam, or a “European” family living in a native quarter in ways that indicated not distress but a willing depar- ture from the European milieu? How to make sense of European ex- soldiers whose domestic lives were more stable and less precarious pre- cisely because they cohabited with their native companions, while their unattached comrades were being described as wallowing in drink and sloth? Nor was the moral landscape of choice clear. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 958

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Illustrates how colonial categories of race, poverty, and choice destabilized each other in actual administrative practice.

Related

• Colonial racial classification broke down when ‘choice’ explained living arrangements. (similarity 0.90)
• Willing departures from European milieu undid the racial categories colonial officials deployed (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial census categories could define away inconvenient poverty by racial reclassification (similarity 0.82)
• Racial categories in colonial petitions were unstable and contested (similarity 0.81)
• Pauperism commissions were diverted by racial classification anxieties (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial racial categories resisted stable definition by officials themselves (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial policy disputes centered on how race should be assessed, not what race is (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial racial classification fused physical traits with moral character judgments (similarity 0.79)
• Racial differentiation relied on affective character judgments, not countable evidence. (similarity 0.79)
• Commission reports blamed mixed-race poverty on native mothers’ moral failings and parental neglect (similarity 0.79)
• Contradictory colonial policies reveal competing racial epistemologies among administrators. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial policy disputes were really disputes over how race could be known (similarity 0.78)